Amid the government shutdown, visa applicants are facing more confusion and are worried about potential delays, as some services essential to their application processes are “under maintenance” due to lapses in funding.

The Foreign Labor Application Gateway website, which employers use for labor certification and immigration applicants use to access documentation for their applications, is down due to the shutdown, with an “Under Maintenance” notice on the site in place of the portal. 

The federal government shut down on Wednesday, as Republican legislators refuse to budge on their desired cuts to Medicaid and Affordable Care Act healthcare subsidies. The last government shutdown was in 2018, also under President Donald Trump, and lasted 35 days.

“Due to a lapse in funding, all foreign labor certification activities administered by the Department’s Office of Foreign Labor Certification (OFLC) have been suspended,” the site currently says. “During this suspension, access to the Foreign Labor Application Gateway (FLAG), will be disabled and will not permit system users to prepare and submit new applications as well as submit any information associated with applications pending a final determination.” 

A notice on the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs site says consular operations domestically and abroad will remain operational, however, including passports, visas, and assisting American citizens abroad. Consular services, including US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), are almost entirely fee-funded and only a small part of their funding is reliant on congress. The American Immigration Council notes that for this reason, application interviews, naturalization ceremonies, biometrics processing, and other parts of the immigration system should continue as usual, and past reports have shown that only one percent of the USCIS would likely need to be furloughed during a shutdown, but that backlogs and increased immigration enforcement from the Trump administration could mean even that one percent could create more delays.

The Office of Foreign Labor Certification website shows a notice about a lapse in appropriations: “This website is currently not being updated due to the suspension of Federal government services,” the site says. “The last update to the site was 10/1/2025.  Updates to the site will start again when the Federal government resumes operations.” 

An Australian applicant for an E3 visa — a specific type of temporary, non-immigrant work visa for Australian citizens — told 404 Media that not being able to access the FLAG website means she can’t access or download the Department of Labor-certified Labor Condition Application she needs for her visa appointment in two weeks.

“If the shutdown is lifted prior to my visa appointment, I’ll download the LCA and be on my way. If however the shutdown goes on past my appointment date, I don’t know what I’ll do,” she said.

The immigration and visa application process, overhauled by the Trump administration since taking office, has already caused chaos and confusion for applicants. On Friday, Trump signed an executive order that adds a $100,000 fee for applicants to the H-1B visa program for skilled foreign workers. US-based workers visiting abroad during the announcement rushed to travel back to the US after Trump’s announcement left them only hours before Trump’s deadline at midnight on Sunday, while some employers, especially small startups, scrambled to pay the fees for their workers.

On September 27, several writers published obituaries about writer and photographer Kaleb Horton, who recently died. The obituaries were written by friends, acquaintances, and colleagues, but all of them revered him as a writer and photographer, whose work has appeared in GQ, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and VICE. 

Some of these obituary writers were shocked and disgusted to discover an AI-generated “biography” of Kaleb Horton was suddenly for sale on Amazon. 

“I cannot overstate how disgusting I find this kind of ‘A.I.’ dog shit in the first place, never mind under these circumstances,” writer Luke O’Neil, who wrote an obituary for Horton, told me in an email. “This predatory slop is understandably upsetting to his family and friends and fans and an affront to his specific life and to life itself. Especially days after his death. All week people have been eulogizing Kaleb as one of the best, although sadly not widely read enough, writers of his generation, and some piece of shit pressed a button and took 30 seconds or whatever it is to set up a tollbooth to divert the many people just learning about him away from his real and vital work. And for what? To make maybe a few dollars? By tricking people? I can't say what I think should happen to thieves like this.”

The book, titled KALEB HORTON: A BIOGRAPHY OF WORDS AND IMAGES: The Life Of A Writer And Photographer From The American West, was published on September 27 as well, is 74 pages long, and has all the familiar signs of the kind of AI-generated books that flood Amazon’s store on a daily basis.

Even at just 74 pages, the book was produced at superhuman speed. That appears to be the normal cadence for the author, Jack C. Cambron, who has no online footprint outside of online bookstores, and who has written dozens of biographies and cookbooks since his career as an author appeared out of thin air earlier in September. He has written biographies about director Cameron Crowe, Fulton County, Georgia district attorney Fani Willis, and pop singer Madison Beer, to name just a few. There’s no consistent pattern to these biographies other than a lot of the people they’re about have been in the news recently. 

All these books also have obviously AI-generated covers, which is the most obvious and one of the most insulting signs that Horton’s biography is AI-generated as well: The person on the cover looks nothing like him. 

AI-generated books on Amazon are extremely common and often attempt to monetize whatever is happening in the news or that people are searching for at any given time. For example, last year we wrote about a flood of AI-generated books about the journalist Kara Swisher appearing on Amazon leading up to the release of her memoir Burn Book. In theory, someone who might be interested in the book or Swisher might search for her name on Amazon and buy one of those AI-generated books without realizing it’s AI-generated. We’ve seen this same strategy flood public libraries with AI-generated books as well. 

"Although many of us online appreciated him and have paid tribute to him as a writer, any real reporting about him—like the kind he did for the figures he obsessed over, and which he would deserve—would reflect that Kaleb was a human being and a complicated guy," Matt Pearce, another journalist who wrote about Horton's passing, told me in an email. "This AI slop is just harvesting the remnants of legacy journalism, insulting the legacies of the dead and intellectually impoverishing the rest of us."

Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but it removed the AI-generated Horton biography shortly after we reached out for comment. The company has said that it does not want these books in its store in response to our story about the AI-generated Kara Swisher books last year, but obviously is not taking any meaningful action to stop them. 

“We aim to provide the best possible shopping, reading, and publishing experience for customers and authors and have content guidelines governing which books may be listed for sale," Amazon spokesperson Ashley Vanicek told me in an email last year. "We do not allow AI-generated content that creates a poor customer experience. We have proactive and reactive measures to evaluate content in our store. We have removed a number of titles that violated our guidelines.”

Update: This post has been updated with comment from Matt Pearce. This post has also been updated to note Amazon removed the AI-generated biography shortly after we reached out for comment.

Within moments of opening OpenAI’s new AI slop app Sora, I am watching Pikachu steal Poké Balls from a CVS. Then I am watching SpongeBob-as-Hitler give a speech about the “scourge of fish ruining Bikini Bottom.” Then I am watching a title screen for a Nintendo 64 game called “Mario’s Schizophrenia.” I swipe and I swipe and I swipe. Video after video shows Pikachu and South Park’s Cartman doing ASMR; a pixel-perfect scene from the Simpsons that doesn’t actually exist; a fake version of Star Wars, Jurassic Park, or La La Land; Rick and Morty in Minecraft; Rick and Morty in Breath of the Wild; Rick and Morty talking about Sora; Toad from the Mario universe deadlifting; Michael Jackson dancing in a room that seems vaguely Russian; Charizard signing the Declaration of Independence, and Mario and Goku shaking hands. You get the picture. 

Sora 2 is the new video generation app/TikTok clone from OpenAI. As AI video generators go, it is immediately impressive in that it is slightly better than the video generators that came before it, just as every AI generator has been slightly better than the one that preceded it. From the get go, the app lets you insert yourself into its AI creations by saying three numbers and filming a short video of yourself looking at the camera, looking left, looking right, looking up, and looking down. It is, as Garbage Day just described it, a “slightly better looking AI slop feed,” which I think is basically correct. Whenever a new tool like this launches, the thing that journalists and users do is probe the guardrails, which is how you get viral images of SpongeBob doing 9/11.

The difference with Sora 2, I think, is that OpenAI, like X’s Grok, has completely given up any pretense that this is anything other than a machine that is trained on other people’s work that it did not pay for, and that can easily recreate that work. I recall a time when Nintendo and the Pokémon Company sued a broke fan for throwing an “unofficial Pokémon” party with free entry at a bar in Seattle, then demanded that fan pay them $5,400 for the poster he used to advertise it. This was the poster:

You might have had the erroneous impression that workslop was bad and we didn’t want it. But Office 365 now contains a Copilot document generator, called “Agent Mode.” Microsoft literally promotes this as “vibe working”: [Microsoft]

In the same way vibe coding has transformed software development, the latest reasoning models in Copilot unlock agentic productivity for Office artifacts.

This is a gadget for faking evidence. You ask for a document, a spreadsheet, or a PowerPoint to back up any garbage claim you want to make. Copilot will go out and generate completely fake work-spam for you!

Microsoft says you should “work iteratively” to perfect the slop. But you know about 0% of vibe workers will bother, any more than they bother checking now.

Security researcher Kevin Beaumont asked Agent Mode to “make a spreadsheet about how our EDR tool blocks 100% of ransomware.” It did exactly that — it made up a spreadsheet of completely fake data about the product! With graphs! Agent Mode also vibed him a presentation comparing CrowdStrike with Microsoft Defender! [Mastodon]

All fake data. But perfectly presented.

We know AI benchmarks are all fake, tweaked by the AI vendors to make themselves look good. On the SpreadsheetBench test, which I only heard of today either, Agent Mode hits a spectacular … 57.2%. [Microsoft]

It works over half the time! It really is vibe coding for office work!

Beaumont says: [Mastodon]

If you don’t know it’s a dumb idea… you won’t know still. The future is now. Vibe going out of business, soon.

• Video version

People are farming and selling invite codes for Sora 2 on eBay, which is currently the fastest and most reliable way to get onto OpenAI’s new video generation and TikTok-clone-but-make-it-AI-slop app. Because of the way Sora is set up, it is possible to buy one code, register an account, then get more codes with the new account and repeat the process.

On eBay, there are about 20 active listings for Sora 2 invite codes and 30 completed listings in which invite codes have sold. I bought a code from a seller for $12, and received a working code a few minutes later. The moment I activated my account, I was given four new codes for Sora 2. When I went into the histories of some of the sellers, many of them had sold a handful of codes previously, suggesting they were able to get their hands on more than four invites. It’s possible to do this just by cycling through accounts; each invite code is good for four invites, so it is possible to use one invite code for a new account for yourself, sell three of them, and repeat the process.

There are also dozens of people claiming to be selling or giving away codes on Reddit and X; some are asking for money via Cash App or Venmo, while others are asking for crypto. One guy has even created a website in which he has generated all 2.1 billion six-digit hexadecimal combinations to allow people to randomly guess / brute force the app (the site is a joke). 

The fact that the invite codes are being sold across the internet is an indication that OpenAI has been able to capture some initial hype with the release of the app (which we’ll have much more to say about soon), but does not necessarily mean that it’s going to be some huge success or have sustained attention. Code and app invite sales are very common on eBay, even for apps and concert tickets (or game consoles, or other items) that eventually aren’t very popular or are mostly just a flash in the pan. But much of my timeline today is talking about Sora 2, which suggests that we may be crossing some sort of AI slop creation rubicon. 

A selection of photos from September 2025